Wasteland
by jenni3penny
Summary: "Because he's the man with the map to these particular badlands and she just can't bring herself to face that fact while still reeling from the idea that she (a successful and motivated and intelligent and attractive woman) cannot keep something alive inside her besides this useless sadness." Pre-series, before Sophie, before both divorces.


She feels... barren... which is such a bereft and ugly word. She cannot focus on its figure too long before it swallows around her. And, really, it's a sound to itself. One that seems silently synonymous with failure while still wide and round on the tongue. The first syllable itself owns the mouth and she decides immediately, quickly, that she'll never press her lips together to make that first sound unless it leads to _anything but that_ word. It's empty. Brittle, dry and cracked open, wasted.

Waste. A waste.

She feels she's become waste (refuse) and a wasteland at once.

She feels hollow and like an empty night. Long dark, no surplus of stars, no sounds but sad ones.

She does not, at all, feel as though she had been a bona fide (secretly expecting) mother for sixty seven days.

She feels what the word 'barren' truly is – but she'll be goddamned if she's going to let anyone see it.

Even, and especially, someone who can see everything.

* * *

Unfortunately, she thinks maybe those veined and spreading cracks that come with being an up-and-walking wasteland are visible now and that it doesn't matter what she wants him to see or unsee. That they are evident in the broken vessels of tear-reddened eyes, in the shiver of her hands, and the tissue tender thinness of her cheekbones. She thinks, fleetingly, that maybe they'll never entirely heal to vanishing. Maybe she'll carry these clues forever. Maybe it will always be obvious that her body murders more that just her favorite daydreams. And also, therefore, she'll be obvious to most everyone and most obvious to one person in particular.

She cannot keep this secret for long, and especially not from him.

Not when he seems to be the only person on the planet that can pluck one single strand of thought from her mind (and especially when it's the single thought she's been restlessly fighting to keep cradled tightly inside of herself).

She realizes within two hours of being at work (less than seven hours after secretly sitting in a dry and sterile emergency room) that she has to stop looking at her best friend.

Because there's no way he won't see the gulf each dry crack has made in her.

Because he's the man with the map to these particular badlands and she just _can't_ bring herself to face that fact while still reeling from the idea that she (a successful and motivated and intelligent and attractive woman) cannot keep something alive inside her besides this useless sadness.

And so she looks down, avoids his eyes and their knowledge of how tired she seems, how sad she looks, how brittle she feels to the trace of his fingers on her forearm.

And that is, no doubt, the simplest but biggest mistake she has made with him in the whole of five years.

"Wha's goin' on with you, love?" His very tone of voice implores her, pleads at her for a connection between her and him and whatever this thing that's swallowing her up (rather, down) may be. Because he doesn't understand it but he can see its dark significance and she knows that nothing is going to stall him now, _nothing_ is going to waylay his search for its beginning.

She lies, or rather deflects, solely because he expects her to, "Just a long day."

It's barely after ten in the morning but she hasn't slept since the night before and so, really, it's not a lie so much as a two-day stretch of truth. He's seen her at the end of a long day and it looked very little like this, though. But then, undoubtedly, he's never seen her looking so desolate. And she can see, can actually _see_ , that this is scaring him. She (whatever she has now become) is making him twitch in that perfectly iconic and mostly endearing way.

"Go home," he murmurs over her, dropping away from looking too long at her eyes – because it seems he's finally seen too much of something in them.

"I'm fine, Cal."

"Gill," he lets his voice go soft and his eyes rise into a semi knowledge that she is all and everything but ' _fine_ ', "go home."

"I can't go home."

That's where Alec is. Or, probably, actually, _isn't_.

That's where their happy family does not exist. That's where she bled and managed to make their immaculate and organized kitchen a desert of nothingness. That's where she cleaned up the mess of herself after she'd come home from the hospital alone and Alec _still_ hadn't been there to help her. And the living room seems just as bare as she feels, stripped of anything she used to hold so dearly close. And, Christ, don't even get her started on the bedroom. Lately even that's become just another mirage amidst an expensive square footage of absolutely fucking nothing.

She cannot go home. And he seems to implicitly understand that just before a widening takes his eyes (and he really has lovely eyes, doesn't he? how has she not noticed how incredibly beautiful they are before?). He's starting to understand and she realizes that he's no longer looking at her face and instead staring his own forceful scrutiny over the way she's unconsciously got her hand balled up and fisted and digging hard into the center of her body, pressing into emptiness.

She cannot go home yet.

And it's as though, without needing to press her lips together to make that hated word... he already knows. She thinks she hates the 'B' word so much because nothing inside her is yet prepared to admit to the other one. _Miscarriage_ , synonymous with failure, makes women (this otherwise adept and competent woman) empty while at once crawling inside and out of them and curling itself around them, leaving these (in)visible marks that only men like him may see.

There'd been no way around him finding out, plucking that supposed secret out of her silently.

She'd been so ridiculously naive to assume there may have been a chance that _this man_ wouldn't know her pain on sight.

* * *

"It's happened before."

 _It_. It has happened before. _It_ has.

She's been here before, pal. She knows the sidewalks and pathways, got the t-shirt, still has the ticket stub...

His nod seems only to be an acceptance before he leans closer to her and makes a demand on her, makes his voice an order of truth between the two of them. "Tell me when."

"Before we met," she confesses like a penitent woman, suddenly needing to be forgiven for keeping this secret specifically.

"Does Alec know?"

There's no need to tell him, is there?

She doesn't _need_ her husband, she _needs_ her best friend.

(Silly she should be in a sort of love with both of them when they are not the same person because isn't that the right way of it? Silly she is, always has been. To believe in romance and love and starry-eyed things. To think that she could have happiness without truth's numb destruction.)

"Alec doesn't need to know," she tells him, knowing it's true. Knowing that he was correct the first time he told her that absolute truth, ironically, circumvents the ability to be happy in most situations.

Ignorance is bliss? Ignorance is salvation, really. In her case – rather, in her marriage's case.

Let Alec be 'happy' and live pretend lies of perfection. Maybe it will keep him from snorting the rest of their joint savings account up his fucking nose. Maybe they won't lose the rest of the rooms in their house (not 'home') to complete desolation.

He squints those myriad eyes as he sees a millisecond of rage on her, watches it tiredly wash into nothingness before he sighs out the longest and loudest pause he's given her yet. "Darling... _Gillian_."

He can't say what he wants to say so he rests all he has on her name. This, this much she knows.

Because he wants to say all the things that Alec should be saying...

 _"It's not your fault."_

 _"I'm right here."_

 _"It doesn't make me love you any less."_

 _"You did nothing wrong."_

 _"We'll try again."_

 _"I've got you."_

 _"I love you."_

 _"It's gonna be okay."_

However... _he_ married a woman who is not a failure in this particular regard.

 _He_ married a woman who makes him a father. _He_ has Emily.

And at that moment she's not sure how, if she loves that precocious and beautiful little girl so damn much, she can so thoroughly despise him for having her.

God, it's not just jealousy - it's legitimate wrath. Screw him and his sympathy.

So she steps back and leaves an invisible line between them intentionally.

"It would devastate him. Why would I tell him?" she accuses, tries to keep that animosity alive despite the fact he is curiously watching it evolve with a patience that says he saw it coming and he knows it just won't last all that long.

Screw him for that too. Self satisfied bastard.

Does he have to know every inch of her all the goddamn time?

"Devastate him, eh?" his head tips into an equal fervor of accusation, "And what about you? Can't keep this all t'yourself, Gill. Can't bury - "

He sees the sharp reaction to his unintentional word choice bloom in her eyes and stops the rest of the words immediately, near chokes himself on the rest of the sentence.

"I didn't." She loses that rage to sudden sadness. It's gone and it's empty and it's his eyes she finds as she deflates under its vacancy. "I told you."

The man with the map to her emptiness, he simply takes her hand in his and squeezes understanding even as his face crashes into its own devastation. But he's strong enough to carry it, isn't he? He's the only one she knows who's got the moxy and tenacity and bull-headed stubbornness (the strong-enough-love and unalterable _loyalty_ ) to take half of it off her shoulders like a best friend should and would. The one who knows the secret paths and passages which lead to each possible hidden oasis. The only man she knew would actually be nearly as devastated as she is by this particular loss – this loss of almost everything she's wanted.

There's shared pain in his eyes as he wipes hair off her temple with the other hand and she can see the cracks starting to radiate out over him, they vein on him and up his forearm. They look just as they did on her as she had stared at the mirror and blindly cut the hospital bracelet from her wrist. The one she's stuffed into the bottom of her purse so that she can dispose of it in a public trash can rather than at home where Alec may find it.

This moment, she knows, is why part of her definitely didn't want to tell him (but had to anyhow).

Because she knows that he has the knowledge of her pain in ways that her husband does not. Because he's the only man she _can_ possibly tell, he's the only man that can make her feel replenished and lush and green in a moment like this (when it _should_ be her husband and not another woman's). Because, inevitably, he's rainwater to this parched and lifeless ache.

On a whole, he's currently entirely the opposite of her - nothing about him is empty of feeling. He's never made her feel barren and he just wouldn't accept her usage of that word either, if she were to say it aloud and in regards to herself. He just wouldn't.

And, to be... _honest_? He makes her feel Spring.

(And, to be perfectly forthright, she desperately wants him to fill her some days. Some day.)

Despite how wrong it may be to find solace in him, how guilty it makes her feel, she needs him to unfold the map and find the right direction and lead her out by the touch of his hand to hers.

It is, simply put, the only legitimate way she's gonna get out of this place a second time.

And the both of them are smart enough to know that.


End file.
